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Don't even think about...
(19 Dec 2005 at 09:54) |
 Don't even think about taking credit for my cornbread jolly roger.
PS. 'skaweek'! | |
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I Got the Cup!!!
(20 Nov 2005 at 17:40) |
800×533 version Here are some pictures, both from my new flash experiments and from the punch and pie party.
For reasons unknown, much of this party revolved around a game where you stand on one leg and try to pick up a bag with your mouth. Because I start closer to the ground and am pretty flexible, this was totally easy for me, so I upgraded to the cup game, where I do the same thing with a Dixie cup. This was just barely out of my reach for several tries throughout the evening, but I eventually got it!! See above. I think this picture is so hilarious (particularly the genuine excitement of the guy in red); big ups to Marcus for capturing it. Sorry it didn't make the Post-Gazette.
Tomorrow afternoon Mike and I head back to CT to visit the dad and the rest of the family and to eat the thanksgiving. | |
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trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and alone
(15 Jul 2005 at 15:01) |
Warning: This is fairly depressing/embarrassing and so intended for close friends (and family), and also for people who hardly know me. If you are not interested in—for the sake of accuracy—having some objective evidence that I am not really cool and invincible, please skip.
(Damn, I'm sure that sounds like a dare more than a warning. How about this: The following is very long and boring!)
Also: Since this is part confession part exploratory memo-to-myself and part plea for sympathy, I will probably feel somewhat isolated if nobody responds to this. But if you want, you can just reply "Bummer." and I will say "Yeah." and I think that will actually make me feel better.
Here it is: I made a long series of minor and lazy and selfish (but ultimately simply irrational) decisions and now I am fucked, and I have hurt someone that I care about. This concerns my relationship. Yes, I admit it publicly: I have been in a relationship for almost three years with a wonderful girl named Heather. Yes, I admit it: Now she insists that the relationship is beyond repair. Yes, I admit it: I insist in return that I am agile enough to admit wrongdoing this time and because of that, to change my behavior, and insist that, because I see that my behavior is not just lazy and bad for her but also bad for me, that this change would not merely be for reconciliatory purposes but something that I actually want.
"What is the bad behavior?" a reader asks. "How can I avoid similarly torpedoing my own precious relationship?" he continues.
The bad behavior consists of two parts. The first is easier to explain, and I alluded it to it in the previous, uncharacteristically whiny post. It consists of me avoiding certain traditional romantic things (or even just traditional things-that-friends-do-for-each-other things), like paying for dinner, or offering a ride that cannot possibly be repaid, or buying flowers, merely because they are a minor pain to me. (I may or may not also have minor philosophical objections to these, which may or may not simply be the result of rationalizing my own laziness, but that is also irrelevant; see below.) Individually, these are not very serious (though it does depend on the occasion), but cumulatively they lead to a substantial hurt for someone I care about, and that is ridiculous.
The second is probably more serious: that I have cultured an aloofness, that I have had for a very long time, and which is part of my self image and so is difficult to delte. I think that this self image is somewhat obsolete, but it is also very comfortable; it helps me deal with and avoid many kinds of pain and disappointment. How does this manifest itself? It prevents me from talking about uncomfortable things, or even just about things that seem to require some kind of emotional commitment (an example is "talking about the future" which is code for convincing her that you are serious and committed about the relationship). An emotional distance is not great, but I think it can be fine to ease into that, as long as it is done at a mutually agreeable pace. For her my pace is not agreeable; she has a lot of hurt in her past, is extremely extroverted and so finds comfort in externalizing this hurt, and also has very strong anxiety about being stuck in a bad relationship and so feels the need to be thinking about the future. Boy, I must be an idiot, huh? Yes, but not for failing to realize this: Of course I perceive and appreciate these facts and of course I know that emotional distance is damaging and of course I even knew that these things were important and that I had to deal with them and that I was being stupidly oblique and evasive as I deflected them and thought that we can talk about these things later, because I don't feel like it right now and plus, isn't it cool to be so nonchalant? And then, when the issues didn't come up again right away, I guiltily congratulated myself, because, obviously, problem solved. Right?
And here is the keystone of this mess (okay, there are three bad behaviors, but this one is not entirely my fault): whenever one of these problems comes up for discussion, be it in mild form or in relationship-rocking torpedo form, I rationalize my behavior, and I think I convince Heather and I essentially do convince myself that what I am doing makes sense. (I take so much intellectual joy in the sport of argument that I even find myself generating silly beliefs that I do not even hold in order to defend them. That kind of thing is great for lunchtime conversation with friends and awful for adult relationships!) But it doesn't make sense, because on no count is one of these minor inconveniences to myself (or manufactured straw-men) even close to being worth what it means to her, and then reflexively, to me. That is what I mean when I say that the bad behavior is actually bad for me, and that I now realize this.
Now, let's not get carried away: I am in fact a caring and faithful and generous person, I do have a dimple when I smile, and I have been totally unlazy (even manic) many times during our relationship. Noted examples: I recorded a whole album of songs about and for her, some of which are actually touching; I spent many many hours helping her learn to program, and even took a class with her that is totally outside my research area, and wrote software for her project that she uses today; I made her a series of unprompted mix CDs with illustrated booklets; I paid my own way to visit her and her family in California, and even had a good time; I committed to being flexible in post-graduate plans, to avoid the apparently common practice of the woman getting the worse end of that bargain; we have talked sometimes about private things that were hard to talk about (and in fact she was probably the first person to ever hear those). Et cetera. Not all of these were easy.
And, in fact, a really bad thing is that we get along so well. We have similar tastes, similar viewpoints on the world, mutual admiration, and really just have a great time with one another. I believe that you guys have observed this. Even in this awful crisis week, filled with depression caused by each other, the highlights for me were easily in the time we spent together, laughing at dinner, and even commiserating in our mutual, well, misery. I can see that she obviously cares for me and enjoys being around me (in fact, she has cited this as one of the reasons that I "get away with" the bad behavior for so long), I see that it takes deliberate, painful effort to push me away, as if she has to rationalize that it is for her own good, and I think that our relationship actually made a great deal of practical sense (in terms of graduation timelines and post-graduate plans, among other things). This is the ultimate incongruity to me: how could it be possible to heal and then achieve an adult relationship/emotional closeness with someone new, faster than it would be to heal and achieve an adult relationship with me?
A very similar crisis has come up before, under eerily identical circumstances last summer, which gives her very reasonable grounds to suggest that I will just do the same thing again. From my perspective, it also gives me grounds to believe that my behavior does not work, which is enough to make me realize that I have done wrong, to admit that, and to fix it. (If I didn't think I could do better, it would be intensely hypocritical of me to propose that we try to fix it, since the last thing I want to do is hurt her more.) It's clear that I matured too slowly, and—more seriously—allowed that maturation to show itself too slowly. But still, it seems reckless and unfair that my retarded emotional growth should be grounds for early dismissal, because it is indeed growth, and how far, really, is there to go?
I can't shake the feeling that I have been mentally preparing myself for game day but then, idiotically, slept through it. Indeed I feel as though based on my Mario Kart skills, she's not letting me drive her car...
Unfortunately, I have a conundrum of diagonalizable scale. How could I possibly convince her that I am done trying to convince her that I am right? Of course that is impossible. So I believe then that she is correct, that she needs to figure this out "on her own", and that the best I can hope to do is to post a lengthy depressing analysis on my weblog, hope that she reads it, and is able to put aside her sensation that she needs to do something painful for her own good, in order to try the experiment in light of these realizations. I hope that you miss me enough to let me try it again, but to do it right. | |
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Stuck!
(03 Jan 2004 at 11:30) |
Well, I had planned to be driving back to Pittsburgh today. But on New Year's eve, as I was driving my father to pick up his own car from the shop, an overzealous left turner smashed up my poor minivan! Now I am stuck in CT until we get the car repaired or figure something else out.
Here's what happened: I was in the right lane of a two-lane (in each direction) road, Whitney Avenue. I went straight through a green light at an intersection while, according to the other driver, the car in my left lane waved him on for his left turn. That same waving car, some kind of large SUV, was blocking our view of each other, and he attempted the turn (quite quickly) and wham! The police officer, who made it to the scene in like a minute and a half (!) says it was the other driver's fault. Here's a lesson: Never wave someone to make a left if the road is two lane and you're not looking at the other lane. Here's another lesson: Don't take another driver's word that a left turn is safe! (Of course, the waving SUV drove off right away...)
Amazingly, this accident was at the same intersection (perhaps a mile from our house) as the last two accidents our family has had, making three different drivers of three different cars in three different directions, all at that same place. From now on, I'll refer to it as the corner of Death and Dismemberment. (Fortunately, nobody was seriously injured in any of those accidents.)
In fact, the most serious injury might be my own: The airbag deployed and hit my eye, which I saw the opthamologist about on new years' day. I sustained an injury to the retina; some swelling and bruising, and some blood in the vitreous humor that causes me to see some spots and floaters. That all should go away, but I need to see a retinal specialist on Monday to make sure that I don't have any retinal tears or detachment, which I would need laser surgery for.
This was my first accident driving. I learned a number of things:
- Airbag deployment is nothing like in the movies. The airbag is not a big soft and fluffy pillow: in my case it is a small and fairly coarse vinyl bag. When it explodes in your face it is not comfortable, basically, it is like getting punched. On the positive side, airbags do deflate right away, instead of puffing out and filling your car, making it impossible to see. On the other hand, the car fills with smoke (which smells like gunpowder, though I understand that newer cars use compressed nitrogen) from the blast used to deploy the airbag.
- If you get hit in the eye and see things, see the doctor right away. I didn't feel like I had been hit particularly hard, but apparently it doesn't take much to get a serious injury. What I saw (and still see today) is a flashbulb-like "afterimage" along the lower-left of my peripheral vision in my right eye (since I was struck in the upper right side of my eye, this makes sense) in dim light, and a small dark cobweb-like "floater" in that same region in regular light. Here's a cool page about the eye.
- Since the eye's tear ducts drain into the throat, you can taste eye drops. This is kind of sick.
- If you get in an accident, it's a good idea to inspect the scene, even if there's a policeman already doing this. Tips: get the make and model of the enemy car(s), make some rough measurements (in say, car lengths), remember the names of the streets in play and their speed limits. You'll be quizzed later in the form of a statement for your insurance company, which might be done over the phone (mine was).
- Do not hit my van. I killed the hell out of that other car, and mine had only a medium amount of damage to the body. Aside from the airbag spilling out of the steering wheel and the part of the body pressing up against the tire, my car is probably drivable. His looked like it was going to explode.
- Avoid the corner of Death and Dismemberment. | |
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